I went behind the scenes at the Fannie
May kitchen in Chicago with Kenly Day,
vice president in charge of production.
We stopped to watch neatly aligned rows
of coconut cream centers march by on a con
veyor. They traveled through a shallow pool
of chocolate that coated their undersides,
then under a "waterfall" of dark chocolate
that covered tops and sides.
"It's called 'enrobing,' "Mr. Day told me.
"It's much faster and more efficient than the
old hand-dipping process."
As he talked, quivering nozzles squirted
squiggly, final-touch designs on the top of
each piece.
My eyes lit up. "Is there some universal
key?" I asked. "Designs that would let a can
dy lover know what he's getting when he
reaches into a box?"
The answer, unfortunately, was no. Each
candymaker has his own system, though a
few do include identifying diagrams in their
boxed assortments.
Chocolate factories, I found, come in all
sizes and locations. One of the most curious
was on the 13th floor of a Park Avenue high
rise in downtown Manhattan. Tom Kron,
a Hungarian emigre, then operated a sweet
little kingdom up there, based on absolute
quality. When I asked him about his clien
tele, Mr. Kron handed me a note from ac
tress Katharine Hepburn, raving about her
chocolate-covered strawberries. Next he
pointed to a framed letter on White House
stationery, thanking him for the chocolate
covered jelly beans.
Also from Manhattan comes the choco
holics' very own magazine, Chocolate
News, printed with chocolate-colored and
chocolate-scented ink. Its growing legion of
readers learns about such things as "starch
casting" (using cornstarch to mold liquid
centers for chocolate candies), the results of
taste tests, and new products in the field.
HOUGH THEOBROMA began
in the New World, Europeans eat
more pounds of chocolate per per
son than do Americans. European
chocolates containing alcohol other than the
small amounts in flavor extracts cannot be
imported into the United States. At Godiva
Chocolatier in Brussels, Belgium, I nibbled
at candies filled with good Scotch and
678
Dutch treat for livestock, cacao bean
shells ground by Albert Gruys (right) in
OoievaarMill in Zaandam (above) are
added to pig and cattlefeed. Nearly 15
percent of the world's cacao beans are
shippedthrough Amsterdam, and the
country keeps about halffor domestic
production.
In 1828 a Dutch chemist simplified
chocolate drinking when he invented
powdered cocoa by separatingout the
fatty cocoa butterfrom the ground-up
cacao beans. Chocolatewasn't eaten as
candy until 1847, whenJ. S. Fry and
Sons, an Englishfirm now merged with
Cadbury, combined the ground cacao
beans with extra cocoa butter and sugar.
Cocoa butternow alsofinds use in
cosmetics, soap, and suntan lotion.
National Geographic,November 1984